Editorial
Front Page - Friday, February 5, 2010
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
When Peter Jackson set out to write, direct and produce “The Lovely Bones,” he must have had good intentions. Perhaps he read Alice Sebold’s novel, about a murdered teenage girl who lingers between this world and the next, and connected with the story. I wonder, though, if he lost his attachment to the material as the film took shape, because although the movie begins strong, by the end, all I could think was, “What was the point?”
I enjoyed the opening scenes, during which Jackson introduces Susie Salmon, a young lady crossing from the eyes wide open wonder of childhood to the eyes wide open awareness of early maturity. She lives in a small town with her parents and younger siblings, has a crush on a boy named Ray and likes taking pictures with her cheap camera. While Susie seems to be going through a phase where she merely tolerates her mother, her love for her father is evident in the way she spends time with him doing things she finds boring, like building ships in a bottle.
Susie is, for all intents and purposes, an ordinary girl with a hint of creativity. She’s also pretty, even though she’s at the gangly age where teenagers seem to be all limbs.
Her beauty is not lost on George Harvey, a middle age recluse who lives near the Salmons. When he looks at Susie, he doesn’t see someone who will blossom into an adult and become a photographer, a wife and a mother; he sees his next victim.
Although Jackson paints his characters with broad strokes, he takes his time with Harvey, following the man as he prepares to do a terrible thing. A sickening feeling crept over me during this part of the movie, and I wanted to scream at Susie to run as Harvey lured her into his trap, telling her it would be rude to reject his invitation to see the clubhouse he’d built for the kids in the neighborhood.
She accepts, and in moments, she’s dead. Jackson spares us the gory details, knowing his audiences will be capable of filling in the blanks.
Susie’s spirit is immediately transported to the in-between place, a mystical realm made from parts of the physical and spiritual worlds. It’s here that Jackson draws on his experience making the “Lord of the Rings” movies, splashing elaborate visuals across the screen in a display of artistic virtuosity: giants ships in bottles crash against a dangerous reef; a strong wind passes through the leaves of a lush tree, then the leaves soar toward the camera and reveal themselves to be small birds; Susie runs across a meadow, a giant rose opening under her feet.
From her vantage point, Susie can see the people she knew continuing to live their lives. She watches her mother fall apart, her father disappear into himself, her sister grow older and Harvey try to avoid the detectives out to solve her murder.
I wondered if Susie was going to help with the investigation somehow or if the movie was going to be about her and her family moving on, but if those elements were in the novel, Jackson either didn’t include them in his script or failed to make them clear in his film. Susie makes a few obscure comments about letting go, but that’s it.
Instead, “The Lovely Bones” becomes about whether or not anyone is going to figure out Harvey is the killer. Since audiences will already know he committed the awful deed, there’s nothing to pull viewers through the story except for their desire to see Harvey get what he deserves.
Jackson does his best to keep audiences engaged, but he misses more marks than he hits. The sequence in which Susie’s sister breaks into Harvey’s house to look for evidence demonstrates Jackson’s skills for bringing the tension in a scene to a boil, but he tries too hard in other parts of the movie, using weird camera angles and indulging in gratuitous special effects. He also goes too far near the end when he includes a stupefying scene of bodily possession that should have stayed on the page, assuming it’s there.
Jackson does pull good performances out of his actors. Saoirse Ronan is a revelation as Susie, and Stanley Tucci does a phenomenal job as Harvey, which could not have been easy. Mark Wahlberg does a nice turn as Susie’s father, too. I especially admired his work in the scene in which he smashes his ships in a bottle and collapses in grief.
“The Lovely Bones” comes across as a movie that might have seemed like a good idea, but it ended up being nothing more than a film in which a girl goes to heaven and the evil man who sent her there tries to avoid being caught. And that’s just ... pointless.
E-mail David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald
.com.
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